LG develop indoor and outdoor friendly laptop display

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

When using a laptop you usually shy away from sitting in the sun because it becomes almost impossible to see what’s on the screen. LG Display believes it has come up with a solution, however.{ad}

There are two main solutions for LCD panels. Those are the standard backlit display which are great indoors, but unusable outdoors. There are also the reflective displays, which look darker indoors, but are more usable outdoors. With either solution you are compromised for indoor or outdoor use.

LG’s solution is to combine the benefits of the backlight and the reflective displays. They have implemented a system where by a button press turns the reflective display on and off. That means when indoors you can use the backlight and when outdoors you use the reflective option – something LG are calling Sunlight Illuminated mode.

The display is 14.1″ and has a contrast ratio of 9:1. LG are also pushing the green benefits of Sunlight Illuminated mode as it does not require the backlight to be on. They claim this saves as much as 75% of the power normally used by the display.

There are no available laptops using the new screen as of yet, but we will get to see the display in action at CES.

Matthew’s Opinion
I have little reason to use my laptop outdoors and therefore wouldn’t see much benefit from this screen. I’m sure others will see the advantages, but I bet most people will use the backlit option 90% of the time.

I doubt LG will be able to charge a premium for these displays as they don’t introduce anything new and are just a convenience for a small section of the market. The energy saving aspect is available, but again, you are only going to save that energy when using it outside, althought you could opt to try to use it without the backlight indoors.

It will be interesting to see how well the dual mode screen works at CES. I’m also intrigued as to how they are going to demonstrate the difference and advantage to the sunlight illumination mode while being indoors.